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I’ve been a pretty poor blogger over the course of the last year or two. In fact, if my calendar can be trusted, I haven’t posted anything since February of 2016.

Although you’d wonder if I was still alive and kicking around these parts, truth is I’ve been quite active on social media. Particularly one platform — where I’ve been giving out writing advice and helping writers on the regular as best as I know how. But that’s not all that’s been new with me lately. In fact, in the last three months there’s been a great deal of uncomfortable change.

There are times in life when you hit milestones, things that happen to most people at some point in time or another. You graduate high school. You get your first apartment or house. You get your first job. You get married. These are the relatable big things. Solidarity comes with relative ease, as you share your big life event with co-workers or friends or family and they lament your woes, celebrate your successes, and encourage you to press on.

But there’s another category of change. The un-relatable big change. The stuff that no one should ever have to deal with. These kind of changes have impressive gravity. They remove all the relatable big life events from view like a solar eclipse. They blot out the sun. Time itself gets marked differently. There’s the time before this big un-relatable change. And there’s the time after it. And despite the two only being a second apart, the collective distance between those two seconds is immeasurable.

Sounds woeful, right? It should be woeful. It should be world-shattering. Earth-breaking. Mind-scathing. What I’ve experienced in the last three months, a combination of one really big relatable life event, and one very abnormal, very horrendously unrelatable big life event has left me feeling far less despair than I ought to feel.

You see, I endorse a particular set of beliefs. Part of those beliefs dictates that we don’t get in life more than we are capable of handling. In fact, this balance is so intricately struck that when we get very big horrible things in our life, we ought to feel lucky for having such trials. Because such trials are not only a nod to our endurance, but we were entrusted with that burden. That’s right. Entrusted. In fact, my set of beliefs states that we should feel blessed for it.

On most days I don’t feel very blessed, or very lucky for my big un-relatable change. But entrusted? I can feel that. Or at least I can learn to feel it. I can try to feel it. Because trusting that you are entrusted with a burden requires you to have confidence in the one who gave it to you. I live better when I trust in that, when I recognize I lack control no matter how much I’d prefer to have control. I live better when I trust because it forces me to recognize that we live our entire lives by grace. We can’t control the air we breathe. We can’t ensure we will see tomorrow. We can’t even be certain that we’ll make it through the next hour. And the more I recognize the grace in my own existence, the more I can live with grace for others.

Because love isn’t performative. And change, it forces us to recognize this. It forces us to see that we aren’t in control. That we control nothing. And in controlling nothing, we live by grace. And in living by grace, we should be thankful for whatever we are given. And in being thankful for whatever we are given, we should treat others with the same grace, the same forgiveness, the same love.

All change is uncomfortable. All change is hard. But there is a sort of beauty in that. And although we often don’t have a choice in the change that comes to us, we do have a choice in the lens through which we see the change.

So today I choose to see this big wonderful life-change and this big horrible life change through the lens of grace and trust and thankfulness. And that’s all we can really do.

It thumps on and on about how I don’t know anything about writing books or good pitches or building relationships. Of course this loud voice is not satasfied with all of that noise. It moves on to how I’m bad at marriage. I’m bad at music. I’m bad at eating cereal. And it’s completely ridiculous.

Everyone knows something. It’s completely impossible to not know something about something. I mean really, you’d have to walk around this world TRYING to not learn things, and even then you’d learn how to not learn things.

I think it’s easy to give in to this voice. And I think some small part of all of us has it hiding there beneath the surface. The harder thing is to ignore it, or better yet, to listen to the still small voice telling you that you do know something.

Maybe I’m not making any sense.

Maybe making sense isn’t the point. So instead I’ll just say what I’m failing to say.

I don’t care what industry you’re struggling to participate in. I don’t care if you want to be a famous musician or author or actor or poet or producer of film or music or television shows. If you’re trying – if you’re working at your goals in any way – then ignore that voice telling you that you’ve learned nothing. Because it’s garbage.

You don’t need garbage. It’s not good for you. It won’t help you. And the sooner you ditch it, the sooner you ignore every internal and external voice that wants so badly to tell you what you are and what you aren’t, the sooner you’ll see that you are every bit the poet, the actor, the producer, the musician, the writer that you want to be.

This wonderful writer (whom I cannot for the life of me remember now) showed off her sticker system.

It’s a quite simple concept. You start by buying a calendar (I spent $3) and a bunch of multi-colored stickers (another $3 for day-dots in my case). Every day, you try to write a certain number of words and if you do, you put a sticker on the date. If not, you get no sticker.

I thought on the topic for a few weeks and eventually decided it was a good way to visually see how much progress I was actually making in writing. Especially me, the king of procrastination.

Also in the video blog, the writer mentions that her first month was basically garbage. She didn’t commit to the system as she had hoped but once she turned the page on a new month, her “practice month” ended up really driving her success going forward.

Personally, I still don’t know if I agree with all the cliche comments that you hear about writing. Things like “The only rule is writers write” and “If you don’t NEED to write, you’re not a writer,” ect. I think things have changed in writing, especially the speed at which books are written, but despite only producing two books, you’d have to be an idiot to say Harper Lee isn’t a writer… and I’m doubting the same standard was applied. No doubt TKAM was edited and rewritten and worked over more times than I could fathom, but still you get my point.

Now, before you rip me up in the comments, understand that I’m not saying writing is the enemy. I’m simply saying when you apply a formula to anything, you’re not accounting for the whole picture.

I digress.

Regardless of my animosity towards these simple “rules” that we bind to ourselves and use to make ourselves feel horrible when we fail, I still do think establishing a solid habit of writing is a very good thing. So I’ve implemented the sticker system.

For me it works like this –

I get a Green sticker if I write 500 words in a day. It can’t just be any 500 words, but it has to be a part of a book I am working on. I’ve got lots of projects that I have really no intention of finishing but just enjoy working on from time to time. And then I’ve got one “main” project that I have every intention of seeing to completion. I will, however, allow myself one caveat. On Sundays (the day before I try to post a weekly blog entry on Monday), I allow myself to call a blog entry worthy of a sticker. If I procrastinate and wait till Monday to write my entry? No sticker. Hopefully this will get me back on track with you all! 😉

But that’s not all I need to build in habits. I get a Yellow sticker if I read 30 pages of something published. It has to be something in a genre I am writing, but I’ve decided I need to stop being so hard on myself when I get picky and put down a book.

And finally, I get a purple sticker if I edit at least 3 pages of either my own project or my critique partners project. If I edit my own too often, I’ll be imposing rules on how many purple stickers I can earn per week from my own work, or I’ll be adding both to the docket to get my sticker (i.e. edit 3 pages of my book and 3 pages or 1 chapter of a crit partners work).

My hope is to build good habits. And being that I’m all about accountability, I’m choosing to share my system with you all so you can ridicule me if I fail at it.

Actually I’d prefer not to be ridiculed. Maybe just pestered a bit.

What are your thoughts on the sticker system? Have any of you done something similar? Has it worked?

Personally, I don’t blame her. Watch a few tornado youtube video’s and it’s easy to see why they scare her. People who aren’t scared of them haven’t witnessed what they can do, what havoc they can reap when they touch the ground. If you’re not scared, you don’t respect the awesome power of the world we live in.

Because this world will tear you up and spit you out without a doubt. And it doesn’t ask permission to do so. It doesn’t play by the rules or give you fair warning. It shows you who is in control and who is not.

The funny thing about storms is you can’t stop them. They always come. They are certain to come. It’s never a question of if, but a question of when the next one will strike. And we are helpless to defend against them.

It’s like a reminder, really. A reminder of how little control we have in our lives.

The same is true for any creative person as well. A storm is always building on the horizon, full of doubt or anxiety, spurred on when we least expect it. Something so innocuous as seeing a friend experience success in our particular field of artistic interest can spur the storm. Or falling behind on work. Or breaking our good habits in place of some new bad ones.

We call it by a lot of names, this creative storm, but we all know its power.

Writers Block

A Rut.

Hitting a Wall.

Running Short on Ideas

A Lack of Inspiration

A Dry Spell

It happens to the greatest and the least of us, and when it hits, it hits harder than a tornado.

When It’s Raining

If you’ve ever run out of gas or gotten a flat tire, you know how frustrating it is to stop moving. Especially when you had a destination in mind — a place you wanted or needed to be.

When a car ceases to be a car, it turns into a giant hunk of worthless metal. A running car could sell for $500-$1000 around here in Minnesota. But the moment it stops running, the tow truck will gladly take it off your hands to the junkyard for $50.

Because when something doesn’t meet its intended purpose, it becomes worthless.

I think we get this idea of worth stuck in our own heads when we run into issues with our dreams. The moment we stop moving towards them, we feel that sense of worthlessness. If we’re not working towards a dream, what good are we? Isn’t that our purpose? Our calling?

It’s a tail spin.

And not the funny tail spin with scrooge and his crime-solving nephews, but the rough kind.

To me, the most incredible part about this writerly storm is how self aware we seem to be when it’s happening. The storm doesn’t creep up on us in the night, slamming into us when we least expect it. Most often, we see it long before it hits us, growing and building on the horizon.

We watch the gas gague drop towards empty and just don’t go get any gas, hoping it’ll all go away.

And the truth is, that’s where I am right now.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying this to earn comments or apologies or well wishes. I’m saying it because it’s true. And I need to face it, both personally and publicly.

Becuase the first step to recovery is always forgiveness.

Forgiveness is the First Most Important Thing

There are a lot of blogs out there that will tell you the best way to get out of a rut.

They’ll tell you to build good habits.

They’ll tell you to stop thinking and just do.

Like you’re a machine, and you can just hit a button and turn on.

But, clearly, it doesn’t always work that way for us humans. We don’t do a very good job at self fixing and self motivating when we’re feeling purposeless or failure crushing us.

So let me just say — the first thing you need to do, or really the first thing I need to do, is forgive.

Forgive yourself.

True forgiveness means offering yourself the opportunity to do better and letting go of how you didn’t do well.

And as creatives in general, there are a multitude of things we need to forgive ourselves for –

InactivityChasing trendsSpending too much time creatingBurning ourselves outPutting art above all elsePutting art below all elseSpending far too much time wondering how people will reactGetting caught up in researchBreaking good habitsMaking bad ones

The hardest part about being a writer is forgiving ourselves. We need to forgive ourselves more times than the number of words we write.

I need to remember this.

And I don’t mean a little or once in a while. I need to know it viscerally.

Because I’ll get through this rut eventually and I’ll start moving again. That’s a given. I never stay paralyzed forever. But this stall is just one of many I will experience in my life. A storm is always brewing somewhere.

But so long as I remember to forgive myself, so long as I allow myself the opportunity to do the opposite and build good habits again…

I go to church, often times playing worship music with my wife. We both enjoy music a great deal. After church, I generally head home, sit on the porch and grill some food, and think/write/read. It’s a pattern. A relatively simple one, but a pattern nonetheless.

Today, I find myself sitting on my porch, enjoying a cigar and thinking as I have grown accustomed to doing, and the same word keeps popping into my head.

Home.

I was reading a brilliant piece by C.S. Lewis, an address he made at one point, and he never fails to point out simple and universal truths. One truth he seemed to dance around was the idea of home.

He pointed out, over and over, that one undeniable fact of human existence is the understanding that where we are now is not perfect. Now every religion and belief system, be it naturalism, modernism, Christianity, atheism, and on and on, recognizes this certainty. For whatever reason (and it is for us to discover that reason) we feel a definitive disconnect with this planet.

Descartes describes it in his writing. As does Plato and Socrates and Leibnitz and Keates and Joyce and Stephen Hawking. The world we live in is not a perfect place. There is a certain other-ness to the world and our relationship with it.

We all have different answers for this otherness, this separation, but universally we try to answer the great question of otherness with as much vigor as we try to answer questions such as “Why are we here?” or “How did we come to be?”

For the naturalist, the scientist, the answer lies in a phrase. Elan Vital. The will to live. Or perhaps, life finds a way.

The reason such a phrase is so essential is because of this very disconnect that inexplicably exists. Our home is not a perfect place. And whether you believe we came to be by natural causes or supernatural ones, the point remains that in either case we are here and here is not perfect. And so it is that Hawking and the like have posited a rather simple conclusion to this imperfection – someday it will be.

It’s mesmerizing, isn’t it, that every culture feels this disconnect? As if we are all sojourners, wanderers and exiles, fated to live in a place that is not home until a day arrives that it becomes home or perhaps our home is found.

As Lewis so aptly puts it – the existence of a thing doesn’t necessarily mean the result will come to pass as we see it. He uses hunger as a striking example. If I am trapped on a boat caught in the ocean and I feel the pangs of hunger, it doesn’t prove that I will be fed someday soon. It simply proves that we live in a world where hunger exists, and food exists to nourish us, to keep us alive. Just because I feel hunger on my boat doesn’t mean I’ll find food. It just means food exists.

So also it must be with our otherness. This desperate feeling exists, which means a lack of otherness, a home, must also exist.

And somehow we catch glimpses of it. We catch glimpses of it in nature, in a sunrise, in a birds’ song or in a great book. We feel, for a moment at least, that sense of right-with-the-world.

We long for home.

What of it?

I once had a compelling argument with a fellow human. We discussed our perspectives on a topic and how they differed, and the conversation took place in loving form.

This human is someone I hold dear to me. But what bothered me was not the argument she presented. What bothered me most was when I asked a specific question, a fair question about her argument, her response was simply “I don’t understand that part very well… but talk to my husband. He can explain it to you.”

I don’t have any problem with disagreements. I rather enjoy them. I like looking at things from a different perspective as it seems to reinforce what I think (and occasionally ruins what I think entirely, forcing me to once again address all of the things I thought I knew). But I did take issue with the response.

Personally, I don’t want to rely on what someone else believes. I want to know it for myself. If an individual chooses to have a different opinion, I’m perfectly comfortable with that. But I would prefer they know why they believe what they believe, and not just trust that someone else knows. And I have the utmost respect for anyone who chooses another path, even when I disagree, as long as they’ve approached the topic with their whole heart and come to their conclusion after thinking on it thoroughly.

I commonly refer to this as facing the abyss. Because it’s frightening and terrifying and wholly unnerving to face these questions. It’s a massive cluster of truly life-changing stuff, awe-inspiring in its magnitude.

I face it every day.

But at the end of the day, I hold myself to this standard. I will believe what I believe because I have amply searched, addressed all of that which I fear and come to some discernible certainty in it.

The abyss.

I don’t know a whole lot of things. I’m not really a philosopher, I’m terrible at politics, and I can barely manage to live my own life for that matter without screwing it up and sabotaging myself – but the question remains and so an answer must also exist.

If I feel something is very wrong with the world around me, isn’t it my duty to try to figure it out? No matter how hopeless such a venture might seem? I mean, it’s not like some consensus will ever be reached among all human kind and they’ll come door to door with a book of answers. And even if one was reached, wouldn’t I then be forced to decide for myself if I buy into it?

So today, I will once again dig deep. I will embark on a journey in search of truth because I feel that truth is an essential part of human existence. I will face the abyss with utter abandonment.

Today I’ll enjoy my cigar and my cup of coffee, and I’ll read a sacred text or two while I try to improve on my view. I’ll deconstruct every aspect of it, attack it from another angle, and try to come to some conclusion. Because if a question exists, an answer can’t be so far off.

I’ll help others navigate these treacherous seas as best as I know how, and I’ll share with you all, readers of my blog, what I’ve found. I’ll turn off my playlist and my television show and set aside my to-do list and I’ll attempt to understand simple mysteries.

Because today, what I’ve found is a question. And a question is a good place to start.

I’m always impressed when people younger than I am catch on to a truth that took me many more years to figure out.

My sister-in-law stayed over on Sunday night and I dropped her off at college Monday morning on my way to work. She’s a very talented artist, and a lover of snapchat. Usually when she comes over, we watch a movie and adhere to the dual-screen-phenomenon — because our attention spans are so short now in America that we need to be watching a movie while surfing the web like mindless-vegetables. But this time, something was different.

I noticed my sister-in-law was not buried in her phone, but instead she was actively conversing, paying close attention to us, and helping us while we cooked dinner, carried plates onto the porch. And then something else happened. She started doing dishes.

Traditionally in my house, dishes are my job. My wife handles much of the other cleaning, but she severely hates dishes and bathrooms, so I’m charged with these less-likable tasks in exchange for a cleaner house. When I asked my SIL why she was doing dishes, she simply responded “It’s keeping me distracted.” It wasn’t until after dinner, when she carried things inside that I realized she hadn’t really been on her phone at all tonight.

It struck me as odd. Not because my sister in law is normally unkind (quite the opposite actually) but because I had never known her to pay much attention to her phone usage.

In the morning, I woke up to a clean sink and I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to ask, “So what’s with the phone? Did it break or something?”

And she said something truly beautiful, a truth that I didn’t understand at 18, and one that I still struggle with now.

“I just realized I rely on it too much. I’m trying to rely on it less. I get caught up in the noise.”

And she was right. It’s noise. And I don’t mean just audible noise, but visual noise and attention grabbing noise. Now if you frequent this blog, you’ve heard me rant about cell phones before. But what I took away from this was something different.

She summed up what I hadn’t been able to put my finger on before.

It was too noisy.

Silence

I was reading a scientific study a few years ago that talked about a guy who recorded silence.

He’d go out to some location, a grassy hill or a forest, and he’d hit record. Then he’d splice together every moment he could capture with an absense of sound. No crickets. No birds. No wind. And he’d splice that all together to record an hour of silence.

The first time he did it was in a major city in the 1970’s. It took him twelve hours to record his one hour of silence.

And then in 2010 he tried it again. It took 386 hours to record 1 hour of silence. That’s 16 days straight. Half a month. To record an hour of silence.

It’s mind-blowing, really. And that’s only the audio noise. We’re not taking into account the rest of the noise, the visual lights and flashing signs and everything else in the whole world reaching for our attention.

American’s don’t know the first thing about peace. We just don’t. We couldn’t identify peace in a lineup. We don’t have his cell phone number. And if he doesn’t have a number, he must not exist right?

When my sister-in-law made an active choice to cut out just a little bit of the noise in her life, she found herself in a position to help people. It was as if she was aware of things she wouldn’t have noticed before, like dishes in the sink. Or how hard my wife was working on dinner. And the funny thing was, when she invited that sliver of peace and quiet into her life, it benefitted mine. Directly.

She gave me the gift of peace.

Peace

Now I know a few of you are thinking this is some far out stuff. And I don’t want to mislead you. I’m a deeply religious person, but right now — this is just some straightforward logic.

I don’t mean “she gave me the gift of peace” like some kind of spiritual present, like she had some power to bestow upon me a mantle of enlightenment. I mean quite literally, she gave me an opportunity to sit down and relax.

When we meet people where they are, and we lighten their burdens by ignoring the noise, we’re not just helping them out in a bind. We’re freeing them, in a literal sense, from something that bound them before that moment.

I was free to smoke a cigar on the porch without the weight of the dishes hanging over my head. I was free to catch up on some reading. I was free to sit in silence and think or pray for a while. And then it hit me.

I want to be more like that. I want to be someone who makes the burden lighter for others. I want to be the kind of guy who does someone elses dishes — who drives out of the way to help someone — who changes his schedule and complicates his life to do something good for someone else.

I want to give people peace. Not in some metaphysical or supernatural way. I want to literally do nice things for people so that other people can take a breath. So that they can sit down and sigh. So that they can catch a moment of silence.

Being a true-bred Minnesotan, I played hockey when I was happy, when I was sick, when I was throwing up, when I was angry, when it was too cold, when it was too warm, when I couldn’t feel my toes, and when I was bleeding after getting a stick to the helmet.

Because that’s how hockey is played.

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going. That’s what my dad used to say. He was full of old addages like this one. Quippy puns that told simple and straightforward truths.

You gotta lean in.

Unfortunately, in hockey, sometimes you have to really lean in.

There was a guy a year older than me who was always on my hockey team every other year. The kid had it out for me. He picked on me constantly. Coaches would say something to him while I tried not to let it bother me. I didn’t talk to my parents about it or to my coaches about it, because you lean in when you play hockey, right? If I had, it just would have made me more of a target. Well eventually, the natural order of male-ness within me took over, and I lost my mind as he took slap shots at the back of my legs. Hockey players don’t have padding in the back of the leg.

So nearly ten years of bullying, being pushed around, and picked on finally culminated in a single striking blow to my left calf, and I lost it. I turned on him, skating and screaming while everyone else just stood there staring at me, a kid who never loses his temper. I broke my stick over his face mask and threw him up against the boards, my eyes locked on his, and I told him to never do that again. And then I skated off the ice, took of my pads and went home, ten minutes into a three hour practice.

My coach never said a word to me about it. And that kid never picked on me again.

A Bad Critique Partner

The lifespan of a critique partner is often times pretty similar to my hockey overload in high school.

You begin your life as a crit partner, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, with high hopes and expectations.

The average author gets enough rejection letters to create their own encyclopedia set before landing on the right agent. But in the beginning, some small part of you dreams about how quickly you’ll be collecting your first royalty check, or whether James Franco will be free to star in your movie adaptation. You’re not dilusional, just excited about the possibilities.

So you send your manuscript out for review and get some great and honest feedback. And then it’s time to return the favor.

At first it’s easy. You read your crit partners manuscript and find good issues to bring up. You’re honest but not cruel. But over time, as the months pass and you get more rejection letters and send out a second book and get more rejection letters, something begins to change. All of the sudden, the little things start to bug you. Perhaps ending a sentence in a preposition. Or non-active sentences. Or maybe opening lines that just aren’t very strong or compelling.

And the more you critique, the more queries you send out and rejections you recieve, the more your hope can sometimes turn into anger.

Until you find yourself snapping anytime you see anything that breaks “the rules” of writing.

Because the rules are important. Because you learned the rules, and the rules will save you. They are what stands between you and getting published. And you’ll be darned if you’ll let someone else break them.

And you’re part right. The rules, they are important. But they’re not constant. Not absolute.

But the next thing you know, you’re telling someone that they shouldn’t have a prologue because editors and agents hate it — only your friend happens to actually need one. Or you’re telling someone to show instead of tell, when somehow they’re managing to tell with beauty and a unique voice. But the rules are the rules, and so you snap and start turning vicious, and you become the very thing you hated.

You become a writing robot.

You become “that guy/gal.” The bitter critique partner.

The guy who’s worked in the same job for far too long. Bad attitude Barry.

A terrible fate.

Now, if you haven’t yet become that guy or gal, that’s good. But if you’re not that guy/gal, then certainly you know who I’m talking about.

And man have they lost it.

The Best of a Bad Situation

But the truth — the truth is that guy or gal was created by being bullied and rejected and frustrated over a long period of time. They didn’t just appear in their vicious state.

They were made.

I’ve got a ‘that guy’ in my critique group. He almost drove me out.

For a month and a half I’ve teetered on the edge of leaving, despite the other fantastic people who are participating in my group. I reached out to some of these fantastic people and talked to them about it, and their responses were enlightening.

They said that our terrible critique partner friend wasn’t always such a wolf. He didn’t used to tear people to shreds for using a ‘was’ instead of the active counterpart. He didn’t used to hate all prologues. He used to give good advice.

And that’s why his transformation had become so unsettling to them. Even they were frustrated by his recent tyraids.

Maybe this critique partner isn’t the problem.

Maybe I am.

Maybe I shouldn’t be taking him so seriously, or perhaps just vaporizing his emails after informing him that he shouldn’t trouble himself with reviewing further chapters of my novel.

In the internet age, it’s too easy to vaporize the enemy.

But I think it’s equally important to not villanize that guy/gal. They are probably a little more than frustrated with their situation. They probably forgot that they too were once wide-eyed and bushy tailed, and didn’t know the difference between showing and telling or when to use each. Maybe they’re trying to prove something to someone else or to themselves and they’re just not doing it in the best way.

Because in the end, I still feel bad for losing my cool on that ice rink. Sure, it may have been justified. But I’d bet money that I hit a kid in the face with a stick who was just as hurt and frustrated as I was. He just didn’t know how to show it. And my reaction probably didn’t help him. It probably reinforced the same idea he learned throughout his whole life.

So maybe I don’t know how to deal with a bad critique partner.

Maybe I’m still figuring it out as I go.

But I do know that people aren’t born in a vacuum. And I do know that the right way isn’t always the way that leads to shaming someone else — even when they deserve it.